Wednesday, April 29, 2009

some advice for the incoming poet laureate---------meanings swarm into the forbidden language // ie latent content // to discover previously hidden zones of mind & reality // hahaha // official assertions that meaningful dissent is always welcome, provided it falls within the bounds of legality, are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation to aquiese in oppression // but poetry exists when there is a short circuit between the image it proposes and the one humanity makes of the world and itself // and the poet is of no more use than what is rather quaintly called a RAGAMUFFIN // and the ultimate destiny of poetry is to multiply itself, dialectically, into the bare force of a crowd // but this is a nation which is at war. a nation which is fighting an unjust and a dirty war. you can't slaughter the citizens of Afghanistan without it reflecting itself in some aspect of your cultural experience // and mainstream poetry is a minor component of the state's coercive apparatus // not that anybody is listening anyway // but poets who collaborate with the government should be shot // ie with fear and hecatombs of broken hearts // ie there's something running across the red road now. their voices are silent, but the chains are clicking // from their loud abysses, through a city and a solitude . . . . ----------stolen, in some cases slightly detourned, from Frantz Fanon, Rene Menil, Angela Davis, Archie Shepp, Ed Dorn, Voltairine de Cleyre, Shelley

Friday, April 24, 2009

would rather be the devila complex organized fact:customer reference 74074or moodchanges, e.g. itchinge.g. a boiling gulf, referencedpage 76, slightly tornwould rather, you knowin the year 1525, stranglingcoruscating wind of circleshere are your reasonsis a calendar, iatrogenicor open to attack, yes,on every level, your callis important to us, mendicant

page 76? oh please,I would rather beyou know, mouldedMay 68, that cracklebehind police linesI would rather bein 1945, you knowwhat was happenedor my 76 shadowsbursting, most peoplehave no problems,excoriated each monthmy adviser tells mewhat laws are

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

And here's an extract from his 1970 Manifesto: ". . . . against patriotism, surrealism attacks with the most sublimely demoralizing anti-patriotic internationalism, which, in uniting Hegel and the wood-carvers of New Guinea, Paracelsus and Marx, the early English Gothic novelists with Lenin, Han Shan and Krazy Kat, Heraclitus and Memphis Minnie, Gerard de Nerval and Lewis Carroll, Black Hawk and Buster Keaton, Mayakovsky and Lumumba, Meister Eckhart and Flora Tristan, Hieronymus Bosch and Charles Fourier, William Blake and Louis Lingg, Pauline Leon and Ambrose Bierce, the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit and the Durutti Column, Amos Tutuola and Basho, Nat Turner and Albert Ryder, Nicolas Flamel and Freud, etc., undermines the traditional national boundaries of human thought and thus takes us further along on the path of human emancipation"

Saturday, April 04, 2009

The City of London protests last week, however ineffective they may have seemed to the official media, were absolutely successful in that they tore a hole, albeit briefly, in the process of ‘business as usual’ and normal, alienated everyday life, something a lawful demonstration could never do. It is not the case, as at least one well known poetry blogger has claimed, that a small group of ‘mad and violent’ protesters were there to spoil the ‘fun’ of nice, reasonable protesters. Far from it: anyone who was there knows the real violence was dealt by the metropolitan police. The anarchists smashed a few windows. The police deliberately provoked the crowd, at one point were seen literally booting peaceful protesters in the face, and may well have been responsible for someone's death.

The peaceful and the violent protesters were two necessary halves of a whole that made manifest the latent violence of corporate society. The apocalyptic, that is revelatory, theme of the protests turned out to be superbly appropriate. All of us who were there were faced with the bottom line of our ‘fun-loving’ and ‘sophisticated’ culture where police violence is clearly the borderline between the everyday comfort of a high proportion of the population and the casual murderous brutality dealt out as a matter of course by our ‘elected’ ‘leaders’. The violence of the anarchists, even the violence of the cops, is insignificant compared to the bloodbaths of the Middle East, the increasing institutional xenophobia throughout western Europe, or indeed Barack Obama’s intention to continue the War on Terror. Most intelligent people know this, but most of them like to pretend that nothing can be done, or that they are somehow innocent. The protesters, both violent and otherwise, are at least trying to work out how capital’s bloodlust, and all of our parts in it, can be brought to a definitive end.